I Hired My First Engineer Without Leaving a Claude Chat

Hiring your first engineer usually means five tabs: a website builder, a form tool, a spreadsheet, your inbox, your calendar. Every handoff between them is a place to lose a candidate.

I wanted to see how far I could get without ever leaving Claude. Turns out: the whole way. A careers page built and published, applications captured, resumes screened and ranked, interview invites drafted and scheduled — all in a single conversation. Claude drives Sitelas through its MCP connector, and reaches into your Google connectors in the same breath.

Here's exactly how it works.

What an MCP connector actually is (30-second version)

Claude can connect to outside tools through something called MCP connectors. Once you add one, Claude can do things in that tool on your behalf — not just talk about it.

You probably use a few already: the Google Drive, Gmail, and Calendar connectors let Claude read your files, draft emails, and schedule events. Sitelas has one too. Add it, and Claude can design websites, publish them, wire up integrations, and read your form submissions — all from chat. That's what turns this from "Claude gives me hiring advice" into "Claude runs my hiring pipeline."

Step 1: Connect Sitelas to Claude

This is the only setup, and it takes about a minute:

1. In claude.ai, open Customize → Connectors.
2. Choose Add custom connector and paste this URL:
   https://sitelas.com/api/mcp
3. Sign in to Sitelas when prompted — that's it. Start chatting.

While you're in there, switch on the Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive connectors too — we'll use all three later. From here, everything happens by just asking.

Step 2: Ask Claude to design and publish the careers page

You describe the page in plain language:

"Using Sitelas, build and publish a careers page for my startup, Northwind. We're hiring a founding backend engineer. Modern, technical, confident tone. Include an application form with name, email, resume upload, GitHub link, years of experience, and a 'project you're proud of' question."

Claude picks a fitting design, customizes it to the brief, builds the form with exactly those fields, and publishes it live — then hands back the URL. No drag-and-drop, no template wrestling, no separate "now go publish" step. Want changes? "Make the hero darker." "Add a second role for a designer." You say it; Claude edits and republishes.

One message in, you have a real, branded careers page on the web.

Step 3: Ask Claude to connect Google Sheets

You want every application to land somewhere structured:

"Connect Google Sheets to this site so every application gets saved automatically."

Claude wires up the integration and walks you through the one-click Google authorization. From then on, every submission auto-appends to a spreadsheet in your own Drive — timestamp, source, every form field, with the resume as a clickable link, and a separate tab per role.

That sheet is now your live candidate database — and because it lives in your Drive, Claude's Drive connector can read it too.

Step 4: Let the applications roll in — then ask Claude to screen them

Post the link wherever you'd normally say "email us your resume." As applications arrive, you don't open a single PDF. You ask:

"Read all the applications for the backend engineer role. Open each resume, then score the candidate 1–10 on: production Go/Rust experience, has shipped at scale, startup background, and the quality of their 'project you're proud of' answer. Give me a ranked table with a one-line reason per score, and flag your top 5."

Claude reads the submissions, opens each linked resume from your Drive, and returns a ranked shortlist with reasoning — an evening of resume-reading compressed into the time it takes to refill your coffee. Then you interrogate it like a hiring partner:

• "Compare #2 and #4 on distributed systems."
• "Who am I underrating because their resume is plain but their project answer is excellent?"

Step 5: Bring in your other connectors to close the loop

This is where one connected conversation beats five tabs. Gmail and Calendar are already on, so you keep going in the same chat:

"Draft warm interview-invite emails to my top 5 candidates, and suggest three interview slots next week from my calendar."

Claude drafts the emails through your Gmail connector and proposes slots through your Calendar connector. You review, approve, and you've gone from "job is live" to "interviews booked" without ever leaving the window.

The connectors compose: Sitelas captures and structures the candidates, Drive holds the resumes, Gmail sends the outreach, Calendar books the time. Claude orchestrates all four.

The whole pipeline, in one window

You: "Build & publish a careers page for a backend engineer role."
Claude → (Sitelas) designs + publishes it, returns the URL.

You: "Connect Google Sheets so applications get saved."
Claude → (Sitelas) wires the integration; you approve once.

…applications come in, auto-saved to your Drive…

You: "Read the applications, open each resume, score and rank them."
Claude → (Sitelas + Drive) returns a ranked shortlist with reasons.

You: "Draft invites to my top 5 and find interview slots next week."
Claude → (Gmail + Calendar) drafts emails, proposes times.

Five messages. One window. A careers page, a live applicant database, AI screening, and scheduled interviews.

What makes this different

It's not that any single piece is new — it's that there are no handoffs. Normally the website lives in one tool, the applications in another, the screening in your head, the emails in a third tab, the calendar in a fourth. Every gap is friction, and a chance to drop a candidate.

Routing it all through Claude's connectors collapses that into one conversation where the context never resets. Claude already knows who your top 5 are when it drafts the invites — because it's the same chat that scored them.

On Medium, add this comparison as an image — the editor doesn't support tables.

	The usual patchwork (form tool + sheet + inbox)	Claude + Sitelas connector	A full ATS
Tabs / tools to juggle	4–5	1 (Claude)	1, after days of setup
Build + publish careers page	Separate tool	In chat	Yes
Auto-collected applications	Maybe	Yes → your Drive	Yes
AI resume screening	No	Yes	Premium tiers
Email + schedule from one place	No	Yes (Gmail + Calendar)	Partially

The honest caveat

This is a lightweight, conversational pipeline — not Workday. No formal interview-stage board, no compliance reporting, no fifty-reqs-a-year scale. If you're a large org, you'll want a dedicated ATS — and that's fine. Outgrowing this means you're winning.

But for hiring your first 1–10 people — where the real pain is just having somewhere to apply, and then reading the pile — this gives you the whole loop, careers page through scheduled interviews, without leaving a chat window.

Try it

1. Add the Sitelas connector in Claude (plus Gmail, Calendar, Drive).
2. Ask Claude to build and publish your careers page.
3. Ask it to connect Google Sheets so applications auto-save.
4. When applications land, ask Claude to read the resumes and rank candidates.
5. Ask it to draft invites and find interview times.

The job that used to span five tools and a long evening now fits in one conversation.

Sitelas is free while we're in early access — set up an account at sitelas.com, connect it to Claude, and let it run the whole pipeline for you.